Structuring an idea database online

July 8, 2010 8:58 AM

I'm looking for a way of structuring an idea database online (a few hundred entries, at most) that will allow several users to add entries, tag them, add commentary and upload files specific to each entry. What am I looking for here?
posted by klue to computers & internet (11 answers total)

A blog? Honestly, other than file upload (by commentators) your standard Wordpress install does all this.
posted by sbutler at 9:08 AM on July 8, 2010

A wiki?
posted by stoneweaver at 9:08 AM on July 8, 2010

I set up memepedia.net just for that purpose... it's a wiki for ideas.

If that's not your solution (you want privacy, etc)... get MediaWiki, or some other wiki.
posted by MikeWarot at 9:09 AM on July 8, 2010

What kind of files?
posted by Jaltcoh at 9:14 AM on July 8, 2010

Jaltcoh: Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign and all kinds of pictures in different formats.

I was considering a wiki, but hoping there was a ready service out there somewhere. If nothing else shows up, I'll build a wiki.
posted by klue at 9:18 AM on July 8, 2010

Can you give more detail about the kinds of ideas, how they would be related to each other (i.e. would a taxonomy or other hierarchical/categorical scheme make sense), and how many entries, and comments, there would eventually be?
posted by amtho at 9:22 AM on July 8, 2010

A wiki would work well for this. I like DokuWiki. If you're looking for something a little quicker to set up, you could probably use Google Sites.
posted by oulipian at 9:23 AM on July 8, 2010

If you don't care about looks, bug tracking dbs (like Trac and kin) are built for this. They allow

* comments
* file attachments
* ordering of priority
* tagging
* search
posted by gregglind at 9:38 AM on July 8, 2010

amtho: To start with, all ideas would be a single line of text. Further explanations, links and files could be added by the poster in the comment section. There is not a great deal of interaction between the entries, so tagging would be, in my mind, sufficient for linking related entries to each other. I strongly doubt we will ever reach a thousand entries, and I imagine the number of comments, with a few exceptions, to be roughly the same as that of a well composed mefi FPP - less than 20.
posted by klue at 9:45 AM on July 8, 2010

To me, this sounds like a job for a Basecamp site.
posted by megatherium at 11:12 AM on July 8, 2010

Are you going to eventually act on these ideas, or just store them for reference? If your ideas might morph into projects, gregglind has the answer. Personally I would suggest Trac - It does all you want (tagging with keywords included) and is super easy to setup and use.
posted by Dr Dracator at 11:18 AM on July 8, 2010